Crossroads Apothecary & Teaching Kitchen

Teaching you how to regain your health one dish at a time.

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Crossroads Apothecary & Teaching Kitchen

Teaching you how to regain your health one dish at a time.

A different kind of cooking class

We specialize in the overlap of food and medicine. In addition to learning how to make a dish, you'll learn about the ingredients, how they effect your health and how best to prepare them to maximize their benefits.

Praise

Praise

I want to thank Keri Connell for her encouraging and useful kitchen demo evening last month. I have been in treatment with her for SIBO since last fall, and am fairly stable at this point. I continue to find that strict dietary limitations work best for me. It was exciting to learn about simple ways for making my eating more interesting, including the numerous dressings and sauces that Keri demonstrated. The SIBO treatment often feels like large scale deprivation, and I felt energized when I learned that I can expand my food prep and consumption options. Thank you to Crossroads for offering this service.

— L.L. - Columbia, MD

Your nutrition class was stimulating, informative and enlightening. You visually taught me how to change my diet and I’ve stayed on it since. I’m amazed. You have provided me with the tools to create my own interesting meals in addition to saving time by prepping in advance. In addition your handout is informative and very useful although I couldn’t have done it without your demo. You are in a class all by yourself. 

— M.T. - Baltimore, MD

Discover Flavor

Our lessons are guided by the principles of the Mediterranean diet and inspired by the flavors of global spice cabinet.

Discover Flavor

Our lessons are guided by the principles of the Mediterranean diet and inspired by the flavors of global spice cabinet.

We created the Teaching Kitchen because we wanted to create an atmosphere where meaningful health transformation could occur. We wanted to do more than just talk about good dietary practice. We wanted to provide a place where people saw healthy food, learned how to procure it, watched its preparation, and ate it in the company of others with laughter and light-heartedness.

We emphasize the importance of obtaining foods that are fresh, preparing them in a way that preserves the nutritional value, paying attention to portion control, and eating in a pleasant environment with friends and family.

An article published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine noted that when a population of people changed their dietary patterns and increased from 5 to 7 points on the Mediterranean diet, all causes of death, and illness decreased by 20 percent. We use the principles of the Mediterranean diet and then customize the foods and flavors in accordance with the class topic.

Come to a crowd favorite class on making healthy sweets, or attend a class on a specific health topic, such as eating a "low fodmap" diet for Inflammatory Bowel Disease. We've got something for everyone.

Our Teachers

Our Teachers

Keri COnnell

Licensed Nutritionist

Keri has a master's degree in Clinical Herbal Medicine and license in Nutrition. She has been counseling the patients of Integrative Medicine at Crossroads for over 8 years in healthy eating, stress reduction, and nutritional and herbal supplementation. Since the kitchen opened in September of 2015, she has been creating and leading classes for patients and the public. She believes that showing people how to make healthy meals, rather than just telling them, is a more powerful, effective, and rewarding tool.

Keri has always had a passion for food and that continues grow with more time spent in the kitchen. She is inspired when her cooking class participants come back and tell her that they are now cooking delicious and healthy meals for themselves instead of relying on processed and fast foods.

When Keri isn't counseling patients or teaching a cooking class, you can bet that she is involved in another food related activity. She enjoys home cooking, fermenting and preserving, mushroom foraging, farmer's markets, and traveling (a.k.a. eating) in new destinations with her chef husband.

Warren Ross

Medical Doctor

Dr. Ross is the founding member of Crossroads Medical Associates, an 11-provider primary care adult medicine group. He has created the sub-group Integrative Medicine at Crossroads to emphasize his commitment to combining the best of conventional and non-conventional health care practices in the primary care setting.

His activities in this area started in 1970 when, as a medical student, he developed a research project to investigate the effect of meditation on health outcomes in people with seizure disorders.

He studied Acupuncture in the 1970s. He came to Maryland to help start the Centre for Traditional Acupuncture (now Maryland University of Integrative Health) in 1976. He was on the faculty of the University of Maryland Family Practice Department from 1976 through 1980. During that time he developed a course for “Holistic Medicine” (now Complementary Alternative Medicine) for medical students. This was the first course of this type at a Medical School in the United States.

He has achieved Board Certification in Family Medicine, Internal Medicine and Geriatric Medicine. His current active certification is in Internal Medicine.